Page 15 - Demo

General introduction131“I’d rather have a root canal…” is a well-known saying to express how unpleasant something is. This saying is based on a patient’s point of view; many people have a very negative idea of a root canal treatment because they associate it with discomfort and excruciating pain. Remarkably, many general dental practitioners do not have a very positive attitude towards root canal treatment either. Root canal treatments cause them high levels of stress and frustration, and the treatments are often performed with an overall sense of lack of control (Dahlström et al. 2017). This is not only inconvenient for the dental practitioner, but also not very comforting to know for the patients who need a root canal treatment. When addressing a problem, it is usually most effective to start at its roots. It would be wonderful if root canal treatments had become completely unnecessary. Much effort is being put into preventing caries and preserving pulp vitality in cases of reversible and even irreversible pulpitis (European Society of Endodontology 2019). It seems, however, unrealistic to think that root canal treatment will become obsolete, at least not in the near future. Thus, the problem regarding the attitude towards root canal treatments still needs to be tackled. Over the past decades more and more innovative materials and methods to facilitate root canal treatment have been developed and exhaustively studied: dental operating microscopes, electronic length measurement devices, instruments made of newly evolved nickel titanium alloys, cone beam computed tomography, and templates with sleeves for guided access cavity preparation, to name a few (Ordinola-Zapata et al. 2019). However, it is still the “craftsmanship” that gets the job done. General dental practitioners should be well-equipped and wellprepared for their task of performing root canal treatment. The roots of achieving the necessary skills for this task lie in undergraduate dental education, which not only forms a basis but also determines to the greatest extent the endodontic performance of general dental practitioners throughout their career (McColl et al.1999, Stewardson et al. 2003, Christensen et al. 2022). During my teaching career, I heard several times from undergraduate dental students that they would like to take a course in Endodontology following graduation, because they did not feel well prepared for the practice. Not only the students at the institution where I worked but also the students from other institutions – from other countries – had feelings of unpreparedness and lack of confidence regarding Endodontics (Stewardson et al. 2003, Patel et al. 2006, Lynch et al. 2010, Murray & Chandler 2014, Davey et al. 2015). This intrigued me very much. Why do they not feel prepared enough? Do they lack skills? Do they have too little Annemarie Baaij.indd 13 28-06-2023 12:26